18-year-old YouTuber Christopher Slayton recently created entire planets, black holes, galaxies and, well, the entire cosmos. And he used nothing but the blocks in Minecraft.
In the more than a decade since its release, Minecraft has grown into a creative powerhouse, with its million-strong community working together to build a pantheon of block-based wonders ranging from the starship Enterprise to the gothic cityscape of Yharnam from Bloodborne.
Recently, Christopher Slayton – who goes by the YouTube moniker ChrisDaCow – decided to take the sandbox’s creative potential to its highest level yet, attempting to recreate the entire cosmos…or at least the elements we know best.
Slayton began painstakingly recreating planet Earth. This would be a relatively modest start compared to what was to follow, but it still took the block artist three days total to survey the continents and get the surface colours, clouds and lighting just right. Lighting the globe proved particularly challenging, but by making the most of a tool that lets you “paint with light,” Slayton was able to bring immersive light gradients and effects to his creation.
With Earth complete, Slayton proceeded to create the other planets in the solar system. Some of these worlds orbit each other at a noticeable tilt, which was recreated in the newly formed digital universe by painting the planets at an angle. This added layer of complexity was enhanced by the fact that three of the planets – Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – harbor their own distinctive ring systems.
Eventually, Slayton was able to build the sun – complete with an apocalyptic number of solar flares – in blocks using some of the brightest blocks in Minecraft.
From here, the scope of motifs Christopher wanted to build became increasingly ambitious, as the digital artist set out to recreate one of the most iconic cosmic structures yet discovered: the Pillars of Creation.
This massive accumulation of interstellar dust and gas is actually a star-forming site that forms part of the Eagle Nebula. At about 4.5 light-years across, the Pillars of Creation are radically larger than anything he has previously designed. However, for convenience, Christopher chose to keep the size of his Minecraft renderings comparable to his solar system model.
In a video posted to his YouTube channel, Slayton explained, “Every time I did a build, the actual scale stayed almost exactly the same, while the size of the object in the universe increased exponentially with the light. Years”.
Impressively, when creating the pillars, he took into account their real-world positions relative to one another, and even modeled the major stars dotted in images of the nebula taken by Hubble and other telescopes.
I just posted a video of me BUILD THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE in Minecraft! It’s my best video so far! https://t.co/FWdQbVumLm
— ChrisDaCow (@Chr1sDaC0w) October 3, 2022
Christopher then attempted to recreate one of the most impressive and awe-inspiring celestial objects in the universe: a black hole. These cosmic creations are fairly common in one form or another in our universe, and supermassive versions of them are thought to lurk at the heart of almost every large galaxy like the Milky Way.
Slayton decided to base his work on the black hole “Gargantua” from the 2014 sci-fi film Interstellar. While fictional, this singularity – and its refractive properties – is an excellent representation of what a real black hole would look like if we somehow observed it from orbit without being brutally spaghettified by its intense gravitational influence.
Of course, figuring out the curves of a black hole is a challenging endeavor when all you have are square blocks to work with. However, Slayton was able to use hundreds of block lines as guides to create the singularity’s light curves, and then light them up to appear as a stunning Minecraftification of Gargantua.
Next, he painstakingly created a bunch of Milky Way-like spiral galaxies and eventually set to work on a depiction of the entire universe. Based on computer simulations, many astronomers believe that when viewed from very great distances, the Universe would appear as a vast cosmic web, in which filaments of glowing galaxies and clouds of gas are interrupted by voids of nothingness.
In all, it took Slayton over a month to create his digital universe, which has to be one of the most impressive and expansive Minecraft builds to date. In our opinion, the time is very well invested.
Anthony Wood is a freelance writer at IGN
#Teenager #Builds #Universe #Minecraft #IGN
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